DCUO guides – Skill points and weapon trees

Everyone here wants to be able to figure out the best way to get their characters innate skills from extra skill points. When I wanted to do the best I could as a fire tank, I didn’t want to waste skill points on stats I didn’t need to help my tanking. I made a chart in excel, then on a whim, made them for the other roles as well.

These charts take the main stats in the game, in order of importance (in my personal opinion!) depending on your role. Basically, it will tell you how many skill points you need to fully max out all the innates for your role in the trees, starting with the most important stat (once again, in my own opinion) and moving on down. Feel free to use this data to mix and match however you want!

Note: This only shows how many skill points you need to max out the stats in different categories, but doesn’t take into account skill points in weapons that you use with no bonus or skill points needed to flesh out any abilities you want in your movement tree. These will give you three or four skills in each weapon tree, but they won’t be block breakers finishers, or lunge attacks.

Here’s the fire tank table I made when first starting this guide. When you’re trying to respeccing 70+ skill points from one build to the other, it helps if you write down your build.

Fire tank

In my opinion, the most important skills for a fire tank in order are health, restoration, crit heal chance, and crit heal magnitude. The last three improve your own survivability and make your healer’s job much easier.

In the first columns going for health, it shows how many skill points are needed in each tree in order to unlock the bonuses in that tree. Brawling and Two Handed will require 6 skill points to unlock all their health bonuses and Rifle, Hand Blasters, and One Handed all take 7 points to unlock their full bonuses. In each weapon tree, the first four skills down the middle of the tree will grant some sort of bonus in addition to the attack they give. The One Handed tree does not have such a skill that increases health, only the 3 +15 health skills. Similarly, Martial Arts and Staff require only 2 or 3 skill points to unlock their meager bonus, while Dual Pistols, Dual Wield, and Bow do not have any bonuses in the health tree whatsoever. Looking at this chart, you’ll see it takes 38 skill points to unlock everything in the weapons trees that gives you a health bonus, and this bonus is an extra 315 health (which turns into an extra 600+ when fully buffed as as a fire tank)

Now in the second set of columns, we look at Restoration and how many additional skill points it will take in each tree to give you your bonus for that stat. You’ll notice you didn’t need to spend any skill points in Brawling, One Handed, or Hand Blasters to get 3 restoration points each; this is because one of the skills you purchased earlier to drill down and get health already gave you that bonus. It takes an additional 19 skill points to unlock all the restoration innates in the tree, giving you an additional 150 restoration.

The same theory applies with critical healing chance which requires 10 more SP to fully unlock a bonus 12%, and critical healing magnitude takes a final 18 points to unlock an additional 60%.

This gives a total of 85 skill points, only in the weapons tree, to FULLY max out a fire tank. I have not included stats on defense because at the current time, very few people have the 95+ skill points possible to spend in their weapons, innates, and movement modes (and if they do they probably don’t need this guide!) and with the current armor set defense is less useful for health for anyone except ice tanks.

That being said, here’s the other skills, and my opinion on order of importance. If you want to mix and match as you drill down, the tables should provide enough info on what the bonuses are for each tree even if it’s not specifically spelled out.

Controller: Power Regeneration

Controller: Crowd Control

DPS

Healing

Ice Tanking

A special note about ice tanking: Ice tanks have a very high dominance multiplier over other classes which allows them to generate aggro quickly since they cannot taunt. After maxing out defense, you can go for dominance or health. I chose health first but with the new raid and content coming out, dominance is probably the way to go, followed by health. I made this chart before the latest update to use on our league’s forums.

We would like to say a big THANK YOU to Kristyana for making ”So you want the most innates out of your weapon trees…” guide. We think this will be extremely helpful for all of the DCUO community members and we hope you will enjoy it.

This seems inaccurate. It takes 68 skill points to max healing abilities, not 58. I’ll try to find the errors. For Crit Healing in Brawling, you list 3sp, however, it takes 7 (- the 3 from the resto listed to the left = 4). 7 for Crit Heal Chance on 2-Handed, not 4. 7 for CritHealChance on Rifle, not 3. 7 (-2=5) for CritHealMag on 1-Handed, not 3. The total offsets your number by (1+3+4+2=) 10, making the total (as I correctly remembered) 68. I didn’t check the other trees, they might have some errors as well.
Also, Dual Pistols has an innate that gives +1% CritHealChance in its tree.

Fire tanks and Ice tanks have the same top three stats: Defense (until capped), Health, Dominance. A fire tank putting any weight into healing stats is a waste. Defense to mitigate damage, health to stay alive, dominance to lower the amount of hits you take. Healers do the healing.

Dominance has no bearing on threat/aggro/hate. Dominance has a sole use for tanking – knocking down (or back, or up) the mobs of enemies so that they can’t attack you. The more dominance the tank has, the less resistance the mobs will have to their little crowd control powers, the more likely they will drop, the less hits the tank takes. It also has some use in pulls – mobs will resist pull powers less, as well.

Damage prevention and mitigation makes life easier on the group healers than self healing does.

Dominance also scales with resto. Dominance also gives you a health bonus when a power is used. 1 Dom = 2.2 Health. Add that to the 60% base health bonus and fully geared, fully specced fire tanks are rocking over 10,000 heath after popping a power.

I explained why they don’t need any extra points in self healing. You explained nothing. Fire tanks have the same stat priority as other tanks. Self healing is not as important for Fire tanks as the other stats because of high mitigation and health pools. Those stats need to be stacked first. Dominance comes next because of the extra mitigation it provides through crowd control. Step 1: Get/hold aggro. Step 2: Don’t get hit. Healing comes third and the healer can provide plenty of it. Pulling points out of Def and Dom to use in self healing is a waste.

the defense innates will only reduce your damage in by less than 2%. it helps but not much. resto, crit heal chance and crit heal mag are more important. get dom then health then those. then get defense. as a fire tank i can get crit self heals of over 4300 leaving the healer to take care of the squishies.

Dude lol as the best endgame firetank I personally know not sayingbim THE best here folks I have never once species into defense for endgame. You get enough from gear the only time its nice is of your running someone. This is ridiculous really man poorly done. Fire tanking and ice tanking require different stats all together at the core due to how they are used we defend our health with resto where ice tanks reflect or mitigate the damage with layers of shielding ie defence where fire keeps me healing total noob dude.